Friends and Neighbours

Being born and bred in Glasgow, then having lived the biggest part of my life in places like Tokyo and Jakarta it’s not really surprising that I had never cut down a tree or worked a field during harvest before in my life. Life though has a habit of surprising us, it would seem that with the right will or necessity anything is possible. Last spring I found my self dressed in overalls and standing on top of a wagon being pulled through a field filled with bales of hay, I didn’t realise I was about to work the hardest day of my life. Not only would it be physically demanding but also bloody dangerous and as dirty a job as you could find. The empty wagon soon became a very busy workplace, bales were delivered and we methodically placed them in rows creating a new standing area with every row; time passed and with each minute I was standing higher and higher as the wagon began to fill. The progression was relentless bales were coming up faster than I could stack them and I was finding it hard to breathe as the air all around me seemed to contain nothing but dust. I imagined myself losing balance, falling off the wagon and at best looking like a fool, at worst meeting an agonising death in the claws of that ever hungry machine below. Wagon after wagon was filled and driven away, after what seemed like a lifetime the field was cleared and we were done. I survived bloodied but not beaten; the day had been about helping a friend who rented the field and used the bales for his horses. Im not sure for what, but what ever it was he certainly seemed to need a hell of a lot of them? I wasn’t the only one helping, most of his family and neighbours were there too, even the kids were given jobs to do. Country living is like that, you have a short window of opportunity to get the field in, then its all hands to the pumps “making hay as the sun shines.” Yesterday for the first time in my life I cut down a tree, actually 3 trees. Felling trees is not a job to be done without any experience and even a city boy like me was smart enough to ask for help. Thank god I did. There is something very humbling about standing watching something twice the size of your house fall to the ground. I can vouch first hand that trees do infact make a very big noise when they hit the ground and that the earth does actually tremble as they hit it. My neighbour and his brother came to give me a hand but in all honesty they did the whole thing themselves. Apart from making sure I was well out of range as the trees fell, I really only gave moral support. I did shout out timber a couple of times as trees came crashing down but the strange looks I received from Tommy and Thomas stopped me the third time. My main job was picking up logs as they were cut and stacking them in neat piles. Unfortunately the piles proceeded to fall apart every time I reached a certain height; it would seem my stacking techniques were not quite up to the task. The clearing up of the debris was made much more fun by the fact that we moved it to another neighbour’s field using a four wheeler. For anyone who has never driven one of those babies before, believe me, you got to try it! We flung it all onto an already enormous stack which was being built for a bonfire party on Thursday night. In the city you can live next door to some one for years and never really know them at all. In the countryside people get to know each other, not in a superficial “Hello how are you?” way. Here they help each other out. Using their tractor to clear away snow from a neighbour’s driveway or helping to bring in a harvest or cut down trees. Sunne people are quiet and a wee bit shy, they don’t talk much about doing things; instead they get on and do them. People say that real friends are hard to find, maybe so, but good neighbours are worth their weight in gold.